Field notes from the front of customer research.
Essays, teardowns, and short notes on building product with customers in the room. Written by the team at Corha.
Knowing your customer is not the same as having met them
"We know our customers" is usually said to end an argument, and usually it means the team met them once, a while ago, and has been running on the memory ever since. I learned the difference the hard way, building an entire prototype for insurance brokers on a belief about them that light research had quietly waved through. This is a piece about why meeting your customers is an event, knowing them is a state, and why teams keep mistaking the first for the second.
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What I've been building
After a decade in early-stage startups, I've watched teams do good research and then quietly lose the insights three weeks later, more times than I can count. I've come to believe personas should be representations you can interact with, not documents you reference, and that customer understanding belongs in a continuous state, not in a folder somewhere. Corha is what I've been wanting to use the whole time, and this is the piece on why I'm building it.
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Why most personas die in the doc that created them
Most user personas die quietly in the document that created them, ignored by the teams they were built for. This piece looks at why that keeps happening, and what it takes to treat personas as a living state rather than a one-off artefact.
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One or two thoughtful emails a month on customer research, product, and the practical reality of working with AI.